I have a Google Doc that I apparently long ago set to have specific permissions—just a couple of people can edit it. Now I want it to have the same permissions as its enclosing folder, which is a much larger list of people. Does anyone know how to wipe specific permissions from a Google Doc such that it takes on the permissions of its enclosing folder?
Moving it into another folder and back, both of which throw warnings that it will be visible to everyone with permissions to those folders, does not change anything.
After a bit of playing around with some files on my Google Drive, per-file permissions get lost when they are set to the enclosing folder’s permissions, or if the enclosing folder’s permissions are changed to match the file.
But I wasn’t changing lists of individuals - I was changing the files/folders between “private” and “anyone with the link”.
What happens if you manually change that document to the enclosing folder’s permissions? After doing so, try making a change to the enclosing folder (maybe add/remove one person) and see if that document changes with it.
Clever! Your suggestion of setting the document to the same permissions as the folder and then seeing if a change to the folder changed the document didn’t work—the document retains its per-file permissions even if they’re at some point the same as the folder.
But now, of course, the document is the same as the folder, achieving the goal, if not solving the permissions inheritance problem.
It’s a minor issue since I very seldom change these permissions, and it may just have to remain a Google Drive mystery.
Note that sometimes it can take a surprisingly long time for Google Drive permission changes to take effect, even if a single file is impacted. I’ve seen it take as long as overnight.
Interesting—I’ve never seen a delay, and before I went in to fix things manually just now, my previous attempts at getting the enclosing folder permission to take over hadn’t happened.
Usually, it works fine, but it has happened just often enough that I’m not terribly surprised when I see it. My impression is that it is more common on Google Workspace drives with a lot of sharing to users outside the domain.
